By the time a family reaches a therapy service, a story has usually hardened. He is the angry one. She is the anxious one. This is a family that cannot cope.
These stories are rarely accurate and almost always harmful, because people — children especially — grow into the account given of them. A nine-year-old told often enough that he is aggressive will eventually organise his identity around it.
Narrative therapy works directly on that problem, and children take to it considerably faster than adults do.
The Core Move
The person is not the problem. The problem is the problem.
It reads like a slogan until you see it work. When a child stops being “an aggressive boy” and becomes a boy who has been pushed around by the Temper, several things happen at once. He is no longer defending his whole self against an accusation. His parents are no longer opposing him. Everyone ends up on the same side of the table looking at a shared problem.
Children grasp this almost immediately. Many will name the problem themselves, and the names are usually better than anything an adult would come up with.
How the Work Runs
Externalise it
The problem gets named and placed outside the child — the Worry, the Sneaky Fear, the Temper. Often drawn, sometimes built in sand. It becomes a thing with a shape rather than a fact about who they are.
Map its influence
When is it strongest? Where does it show up? What does it cost? Who does it recruit onto its side? Asked with curiosity, never with blame.
Hunt the exceptions
The times the problem should have won and did not. These always exist and are always overlooked, because they do not fit the dominant story.
Thicken the alternative story
Those exceptions get built out into a fuller account — a child who is resourceful and brave, a parent who kept showing up, a family that held on through something hard.
Recruit witnesses
New stories need an audience to survive. Parents, siblings, grandparents and teachers are brought in to notice and reinforce what has changed.
Externalising is not excusing. A common concern, and the opposite tends to happen in practice. Children who are not defending their entire identity become markedly more able to take responsibility for what they did.
Why It Matters After Trauma
Trauma and family violence leave people with a story in which they were only ever helpless, and children with a story in which they were somehow at fault. Narrative work does not deny what happened. It recovers what the dominant story left out — including everything the child did to survive it, which is usually a great deal and is almost never counted.
What Parents Can Take From It
You do not need to be a therapist to use the central idea.
- Change the grammar. “The Worry is getting big tonight” rather than “you’re being anxious again”.
- Notice the exceptions out loud. “The Temper tried to get you at the shops and you didn’t let it” is a genuinely powerful sentence.
- Be a witness. Tell someone else, in front of your child, about something they managed.
- Watch the labels the household uses. Family nicknames and running jokes shape identity more than anyone intends.
Why It Works Well With Culturally Diverse Families
Narrative therapy treats the family as the expert on their own life and culture, and the therapist as someone asking useful questions. It does not require a family to adopt a Western explanation of distress in order to be helped, and it treats cultural, family and faith knowledge as legitimate resources rather than as obstacles. For many families that difference is what makes therapy possible at all.
If you or a child is in immediate danger, call 000. For 24/7 support contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, or Safe Steps on 1800 015 188. Our counselling service is not a crisis or after-hours service.
We use narrative therapy alongside play interventions and child and family counselling across the Goulburn Region and Melbourne North.
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